Classic French sauces—the original mothers of invention

Sure, a few foods (steak and lobster, for example) are delicious on their own, but a great sauce both enhances and compliments the dish you’re serving. Imagine plain pasta and how boring that can be.

There is a whole world of sauces out there—each cuisine has its own pantheon. Even within what we might consider to be one cuisine, like Chinese, there are regional differences. A Cantonese dish with be sauced quite differently from one from Sichuan. But there are some basics we can look at in Western cuisine.

The French, of course, have turned cooking into a science, literally. They have taken saucing and created an entire classification system. It starts with five “mother” sauces, each of which forms the basis for other “small” or “compound” sauces.

The five mother sauces are: béchamel (aka white sauce), velouté, Espagnole (aka brown sauce), tomato, and hollandaise. We’ll take them one at a time.

Béchamel

Béchamel is made by thickening milk with a roux made of butter and flour (the original technique was a bit different, but produced similar results). The sauce is moderately thick and very creamy, with a rich flavor and very smooth texture.

Bechamél

The key to a great béchamel is patience—you need to add the milk slowly to be sure any lumps are worked out. While modern recipes don’t always call for it, the classic technique includes simmering for ½ hour to endure the proper consistency and flavor.

The process for velouté is very similar to béchamel. The difference is in the liquid added to the roux—for velouté, you add white stock (veal, chicken, or fish stock made from unroasted bones) instead of milk.

The small sauces made from velouté are a bit more complicated than those made from béchamel. Note that while pan gravy is very similar in technique to velouté, it is not considered to be one, since it usually uses the pan drippings in the roux instead of butter.

Small and compound sauces (note that the first two use fish velouté; the rest use chicken or veal):

Bercy (fish-based): Sauté an ounce of finely diced shallots in butter. Deglaze with ½ cup white wine, then add ½ cup fish stock. Reduce by a third and stir in 2 cups of fish-stock velouté. Season with salt and pepper.

Normandy (fish): add 2 oz. chopped mushrooms and ¼ c. fish stock to 2 cups fish-stock velouté. Reduce by a third. Mix one egg yolk with 1/3 cup cream. Temper the cream mixture by slowly adding about at third of the hot sauce a bit at a time while stirring. Then add the cream mixture back into the remaining sauce, stir, and simmer briefly without boiling. Strain through a fine mesh strainer, then season.

Allemande: Heat 2 cups of chicken or veal velouté to a simmer. Mix one egg yolk with 1/3 cup cream. Temper the cream mixture by slowly adding about a third of the hot sauce a bit at a time while stirring. Then add the cream mixture back into the remaining sauce, stir, and simmer briefly without boiling. Strain through a fine mesh strainer, then season.

Aurora: add an ounce of tomato paste to 2 cups Allemande sauce. Finish with a tablespoon of butter.

Suprême sauce: simmer 2 cups chicken or veal velouté with an ounce of mushrooms until reduced by one quarter. Add ½ cup heavy cream, season with salt and pepper, then strain through a fine mesh strainer.

Hungarian: Sweat an ounce of diced onion in a little bit of butter. Add ½ tbsp. paprika. Stir in 2 cups of suprême sauce. Cook for 2-3 minutes, then season and strain. Finish with a bit of butter

Sauce Espagnole

Sauce Espagnole

Sauce Espagnole, or brown sauce, is not often used on its own. Its main use is to make demi-glace, a thick, rich sauce that is used to thicken and flavor many other sauces.

This resembles the jars of sauce in the pasta aisle the way a Picasso resembles a person’s face—you can tell that some of the parts are the same, but the result is very different. This is a very hearty sauce that is perhaps closest (ironically) to the Italian “gravy” that The Sopranos made famous.

Spanish: prepare Creole as above, but add 2 oz. sliced mushrooms to the initial sauté. Garnish with chopped olives at the end.

Hollandaise

What, you thought this was just something you poured over poached eggs when having a special breakfast? As good as that is, hollandaise is a truly great sauce with many potential uses. We still remember a delicious appetizer of Maryland crab cakes served with a lemony Hollandaise that was out of this world. But we digress.

Asparagus with Hollandaise

Hollandaise is the trickiest of the mother sauces to master. It required a fairy precise technique to avoid scrambling the eggs. However, there is a simpler blender method that is practically foolproof. The resulting sauce isn’t quite as frothy, light, and creamy as the classic method, but it’s pretty darn close.

Bérnaise: This is considered by some to be a mother sauce, because it doesn’t use finished hollandaise. But that’s quibbling. Combine 1 oz. shallots, 2½ tbsp. chopped tarragon, 1½ tbsps. Chopped fresh chervil, ½ tsp. crushed black peppercorns, and ½ cup white wine vinegar. Reduce to ¼ cup and add this to the egg yolks in the first step of the hollandaise recipe, proceeding from there (assumes you are making two cups of sauce). Garnish with fresh tarragon. This is great over steak.

Choron: Add an ounce each (by weight) of tomato paste and heavy cream to 2 cups of sauce bérnaise.